Settings South of the Border Trivia Quiz

Answer:

The novels listed here range from Victorian era Romanticism through to 21st century crime dramas. They also cover the length and breadth of the UK.

Initially published in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell in a three-volume book along with her sister Anne's "Agnes Grey", "Wuthering Heights" was UK author Emily Brontė's only novel. The action takes place between two families living on the moors of West Yorkshire and was controversial for its portrayal of mental and physical abuse. West Yorkshire is in the north of England and the heather-clad moors are a wild landscape with wide-open undulating hills.

The crime scene in "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (1901/02) by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle is the atmospheric moors of Dartmoor in Devon. The story also takes place in London. Dartmoor is vast moorland in the county of Devon, in southwest England with a rugged landscape of forests, rivers, wetlands and tors. It is an area of Neolithic tombs, Bronze Age stone circles, and abandoned mediaeval farmhouses. Princetown is home to Dartmoor Prison which has also has a role in the story.

The 1913 novel "Sons and Lovers" by D. H. Lawrence is set in the coal-mining village of Bestwood in Nottinghamshire, in the East Midlands of England. It sits more or less in the middle of England, measured from the Scottish border and from the Welsh border.

The real-life location for "Watership Down" (1972), the adventure novel written by Richard Adams, is a hill at Ecchinswell, Hampshire in south England. The anthropomorphised rabbits lived in an area which in real-life is known for its steep northern flank and gentle southern slope. The top of the hill is thickly wooded with beech, ash, field maple, and oak trees.

The children's novel "Winnie-the-Pooh" (1926) by A. A. Milne is set in the fictional Hundred Acre Wood. The wood providing the inspiration for the stories was inspired by Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England. The writer's country home at Cotchford Farm, Hartfield was just to the north of Ashdown Forest.

Set in the summer of 1929, the setting for the children's adventure novel "Swallows and Amazons" (1930) by Arthur Ransome is the Lake District in north-west England. This mountainous area in Cumbria is an area of lakes, rugged fells and quaint villages. The book was inspired by a summer spent teaching a friend's children to sail.

"Apple Tree Yard" (2013) is a psychological thriller set in London. Written by Louise Doughty, it moves around different London locations including the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. The TV series based on the book also had filming in Buckinghamshire, all well south of the border with Scotland.

Published in 2021, "The Lamplighters" by Emma Stonex uses Cornwall as the setting. Cornwall is characterised by a coastline of cliffs broken up by sea inlets. The story, although set in Cornwall, was inspired by the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from the Scottish Flannan Isles Lighthouse in 1900. There has also been amongst others a "Doctor Who" TV episode, a 2018 film "The Vanishing", an opera "The Lighthouse" (1979), and a Genesis song about the incident.

The butler in "The Remains of the Day" (1989) by Nobel Prize-winning British author Kasuo Ishiguro reminisces about his time at the fictitious Darlington Hall. The setting is near Oxford, north-west of London, England. The film adaptation used various English stately homes. He is travelling to Cornwall during his reminisces.

Bruce Chatwin wrote the novel "On the Black Hill", published in 1982. The farmhouse sits on the border between Herefordshire in England and Radnorshire in Wales. It is hilly country. The book was adapted for the film of the same name released in 1987.

For completeness: "The Blackhouse" (2011) is a thriller by Peter May and based on the Scottish Isle of Lewis, part of his Lewis Trilogy; the 1961 novel "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" by Muriel Spark is set in Edinburgh, Scotland; "Raven Black" is a 2006 novel set in the Shetland Isles in the north of Scotland, the first of an eight-novel mystery series by Ann Cleeves; the Scottish Isle of Skye is the setting for Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel "To the Lighthouse"; and "44 Scotland Street" (the episodic novel by Alexander McCall Smith, being published as a serial in "The Scotsman" newspaper from 2004) can be found in Edinburgh, Scotland.